{"id":25532,"date":"2023-09-05T16:58:40","date_gmt":"2023-09-05T16:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uaaglobal.com\/icymi-imagining-social-protections-for-all\/"},"modified":"2023-09-05T16:58:40","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T16:58:40","slug":"icymi-imagining-social-protections-for-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uaaglobal.com\/icymi-imagining-social-protections-for-all\/","title":{"rendered":"ICYMI: Imagining social protections for all"},"content":{"rendered":"
“Sometimes when we\u2019re living inside a system, it\u2019s hard to imagine what an alternative could look like. In our desire to make progress \u2014 to improve the way things work \u2014 we focus on a tweak here, a shift in implementation there,” said Althea Erickson, former director of Center for Cultural Innovation’s research and advocacy work. “And to some extent, that can be a good and pragmatic strategy. But it has its downsides.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“When we seek fixes for the systems we live in, we may unintentionally reinforce and entrench systems that simply don\u2019t work \u2014 or worse, undermine our chances of achieving more transformative change. For example, the U.S. social safety net excludes huge swaths of workers \u2014 independent artists, domestic workers, farm workers, self-employed workers, sex workers, and undocumented workers, just to name a few. Some of these groups were explicitly excluded, while others were merely overlooked. A lot of effort has gone toward closing these gaps \u2014 expanding existing systems to new populations by, for example, including domestic workers in labor laws or excluding workers from unemployment insurance. But what if the 21st-century workforce simply doesn\u2019t fit into 20th-century systems?”<\/p>\n
“What if we started fresh and codesigned a set of social and economic protections that meet the needs of today\u2019s workforce, unencumbered by the past? And what if we started that conversation with the workers who have, in the past, been excluded from it \u2014 the ones not protected by today\u2019s safety net? What types of protections might we imagine together? And wouldn\u2019t that system be more likely to actually work for everyone?”<\/p>\n